Bush Ghouls' Deplorable Zombie Act

A recent article in Salon did a good job of helping me assemble and organize quite a number of my recent discontents related to what seems like a reemergence of some of the more shameless war criminals in our country's recent sad history:

It’s been more than five years since Dick Cheney left the White House and nearly eight years since Donald Rumsfeld was booted from the Pentagon. With the obvious exception of George W. Bush himself, no two men were more responsible for the United States’ disastrous and criminal invasion of Iraq, as well as its embrace of a counter-terrorism model built on the twin barbarities of indefinite detention and systematic torture. In the years that have passed since their departure from public office, both men have released best-selling memoirs, made countless media appearances and no doubt added substantially to their already considerable wealth.

There is a saying to the effect that in war the winners get to write the history, possibly sourced from the George Orwell Essay History is Written By the Winners.  I would argue that this dictum does not apply in the present case.  There were no winners in the invasions and subsequent atrocities committed in our name in Afghanistan and Iraq.  And there is really no excuse for our media, such as they are, and the current regime, to be complicit or even overtly responsible for allowing a flagrantly incorrect accounting of one of our darker episodes to remain in circulation.

Salon again:

. . . to get a real sense of just how little these men have had to pay for their sins, consider three recent examples.

One is a recent comment from Dick Cheney, delivered in public — not in private, not on background, not via unknown insiders with intimate knowledge of the former vice president’s thinking, but in public — about whether he still supports waterboarding (or torture, as most people besides Cheney tend to call it): “If I had to do it all over again,” Cheney said, “I would.”

The second is the new documentary, “The Unknown Known,” by Errol Morris and about Donald Rumsfeld. Estimations of the film’s quality vary, but all reviewers are unanimous in at least one regard: Rumsfeld, as he comes off in the film, truly has no regrets. [break]

The third story is, to my mind, the most disturbing. It’s a piece in the New York Times, published Friday, about a third man, a man who ignored warnings of a terrorist attack, plunged his country into two disastrous wars, invaded a sovereign nation without sanction from the United Nations and on false pretexts, signed off on the implementation of a worldwide torture regime, secretly initiated domestic surveillance on an unprecedented scale, oversaw the destruction of one of the world’s greatest cities, and cut taxes for, and thwarted regulations against, the Wall Street power-players who destroyed the global economy and consigned millions of people to lives of poverty, unemployment and deferred dreams. That man is George W. Bush, and the article is a puff piece about his kitschy paintings.

This is a moderately lengthy article, but well worth your time.  For me it goes to the heart of some of the critical considerations needed to maintain a conscience and moral system in the face of a society, media, and culture that are almost entirely unsupportive of these constructs.

Of course, Cheney, Rumsfeld and Bush are hardly the first American war criminals to escape justice. Richard Nixon, in whose administration the former two men served, immediately comes to mind. Henry Kissinger, too. As was the case for Nixon and Kissinger, Bush and Cheney and Rumsfeld have benefitted from a decision of the political ruling class — and, to a lesser degree, of the general public— that it’s best not to dwell too much on the nastier bits of America’s recent history. Back when some touchingly naïve souls thought it a possibility, President Obama used to dismiss the notion of holding his predecessors accountable for torture by urging America to “look forward.” This was an order that the vast majority of Americans showed themselves willing to follow.

The article goes on to explicitly connect this pattern of unaccountability and the elites of our country protecting themselves and each other to the emergence of the Koch brothers and others as totally unaccountable buyers of politicians and the legal process, enabled With pathetically thin skins to boot.  And increasingly enabled by our corrupted ideological a-justicial "Supreme" Court. 

What more does it take to lead to the modern equivalent of pitchforks and pikes in the street?